Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, based at the University of Lodz, is an international and interdisciplinary journal, which seeks to engage in contemporary debates in the humanities by inviting contributions from literary and cultural studies intersecting with literary theory, gender studies, history, philosophy, and religion. Text Matters was founded and developed by Professor Dorota Filipczak (1963-2021). The journal focuses on textual realities, but contributions related to art, music, film and media studies addressing the text are also invited.
“The city of their fathers”: Urban Space, Memory, and Language in Stuart Dybek’s Short Fiction
Stuart Dybek is a writer invariably associated with his neighborhood of Pilsen/Little Village on Chicago’s Lower West Side. Having grown up there as a descendant of immigrants from Poland, Dybek frequently “revisits” his old neighborhood in his writing. His texts showcase the changes of the urban space, narrated through references to the material, social, cultural, and linguistic environment. In this essay, I will analyze two of Dybek’s texts—the sequence “Hot Ice” from his second collection of stories The Coast of Chicago and the story “Qué Quieres” from I Sailed with Magellan—to probe the palimpsestic construction of urban space, whereby the past, present, and future of urban orders are narrated simultaneously. Both texts illustrate ethnic succession in the neighborhood—from Slavs to Hispanics—which finds its reflection in the linguistic layer of the stories and construes translation as an inevitable element of urban experience.
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All but a Pose? Unlikeable Heroines in Contemporary Fiction by Women
The present research grows out of an engagement with emerging trends in contemporary fiction by young women authors whose works frequently feature unrelatable and ultimately unlikable female narrators and/or protagonists. Within the framework provided by dissociative feminism and nascent Femcel/Femceldom Studies, I investigate the portrayal in fiction of female protagonists who are young and talented, but who nevertheless struggle with strong self-destructive tendencies. In the first part of the article, devoted to Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney and The Lesser Bohemians (2016) by Eimear McBride, I enquire whether the two authors’ young protagonists fall into the trap of repeating their own patterns, or whether they manage to overcome the self-delusion that smart and sensitive types like themselves are prone to wallow in, both physically and mentally. The second part turns to Lisa Taddeo’s and Eliza Clark’s troubled narrators in their respective debuts, Animal (2021) and Boy Parts (2020), offering a comparison of the two novels in terms of their treatment of predatory, cunning, and deceptive female protagonists. In an attempt to dissect the empathy and support gained among readerships by unconventional female protagonists, I also explore the ways in which misogynistic narratives about female depravity are appropriated and reclaimed by female authors who then “recycle” them for their own purposes, daring to challenge the patriarchal order.
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“Stop Read Listen”: A Review of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City, edited by Tong King Lee (Routledge, 2021)
Surviving Hamlet: Female Trauma through the Lens of Judith Lewis Herman’s Theory
This article employs Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery Theory as a framework to explore the theme of female trauma in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play renowned for its intricate psychological depth. It analyzes the traumatic events experienced by the pivotal female characters, Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, examining their traumas, with specific focus on Gertrude’s inner struggles regarding remarriage and Ophelia’s trauma stemming from political manipulation and her lover’s betrayal. Symptoms such as hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction observed in the female characters are scrutinized, as are the recovery efforts of both characters, in particular, Gertrude’s quest for stability and efforts at reconnection with Hamlet, as well as Ophelia’s remembrance and mourning process. Through close textual analysis and engagement with contemporary trauma scholarship, this article demonstrates that Shakespeare’s portrayal of female suffering offers nuanced insights into the interplay between personal trauma and social structures, while highlighting the limitations imposed on female recovery in a patriarchal context.
Redefining Death in Zero K by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) focuses on the possibility of overcoming death through cryonics. The narrative is set primarily in the Convergence—a facility which utilises cryonics to provide its subjects with the possibility of life extension, and a promise of a better life in the future. The result is achieved by removing the subjects’ internal organs and keeping them alive in a state of life suspension, in an attempt to renegotiate the limits of human existence. As his father and stepmother become patients of the Convergence, the protagonist of the novel, Jeff Lockhart, grapples with the questions of life and death. The paper analyses the theme of death in the novel from the posthumanist perspective of Rosi Braidotti’s text “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” and compares it with the pursuit of immortality highlighted by the transhumanist movement. The secondary purpose of this paper is to investigate how the novel redefines grief by using the framework provided by Monika Rogowska-Stangret’s ethical stance presented in Być ze świata (Being-of-the-World).
Precious Evanescence: The “Little Angels” by Chichico Alkmim through the Lens of Vladimir Jankélévitch
This article establishes a dialogue between two distinct domains: the portraits of deceased infants—known in Brazil as anjinhos (“little angels”)—captured by the Brazilian photographer Chichico Alkmim (1886–1978) in the first decades of the 20th century in the region of Diamantina (Minas Gerais), and the thought of the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85), who deeply reflected on themes such as death, memory, transience, irreversibility, and innocence. The article is divided into two main sections, each with two subsections. The first section begins by contextualizing the conception of the anjinho in the popular and religious collective imagination of Minas Gerais, from colonial times to the early 20th century (1.1). It then introduces Chichico Alkmim’s biography and his particular approach to the anjinhos portraits (1.2). The second section shifts the focus to the project’s central aim, connecting cultural and historical implications, as well as artistic traits of this poignant photographic production to certain aspects of Jankélévitch’s work. Initially, this connection is explored through a negative approach (2.1), highlighting how the religious beliefs surrounding the anjinhos, the association between childhood and death, and postmortem photography contrast with Jankélévitch’s values and sensibility. The final subsection (2.2), however, delves into a point that might draw the philosopher closer to Chichico’s anjinhos portraits: the commitment (endowed with ontological and ethical implications) of attesting to a completed existence.
Lumpenbroletariat among the Polystyrene Butterflies: On Robert Rybicki’s The Squatters’ Gift (Dar Meneli) as Poetic Travelogue
Dar Meneli (The Squatters’ Gift)—a collection by Polish poet Robert Rybicki, a self-proclaimed happener—is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. His peripatetic poems pass through—and sometimes squat in—numerous, often industrial cities, including Gliwice, Wrocław, Poznań, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Rybnik, Kraków, Warsaw, Toruń, Gdańsk, Świnoujście, and Lublin. Written over a five-year period in which Rybicki was intermittently squatting or engaging in collective action, Dar Meneli excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational dialogic poetry pointedly unapologetic, where Greek mythology intersects with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory, time travel, and psychedelic dumpster diving. An inheritor of 20th-century European avant-garde poets Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan, and Tristan Tzara, Rybicki works at the border between performance and (language) disruptions. Understandably, his poetry presents an array of translational challenges, ranging from acrobatic multilingualism to implosive neologisms. Drawing from my own experiences as a translator of Robert Rybicki’s work, this article has three aims: first, to outline Joan Retallack’s concept of “the poethical wager”; secondly, to consider how Retallack’s “poethics” can open a pathway to transposing poetics to a translation practice (and to translating Rybicki in particular), a practice modeled after what Jerzy Jarniewicz has termed the “legislator-translator”; and thirdly, to demonstrate that what Sherry Simon terms the “translation zone” is a distinguishing feature of Rybicki’s multilingual poetics in his collection The Squatters’ Gift.
In Search of Autonomy: Sexuality and the Promise of Liberation in Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
Around the launch of the Penguin series Writers from the Other Europe in 1974, Philip Roth’s novels turned to the intersections between sexuality and Jewish-American life with an increased intensity. Roth’s choice to include Witold Gombrowicz in the series invites new perspectives on the representation of collective experience and individual freedom by writers who saw their heritage not only as ill-fated but also fraught. While both authors grapple with the idea of commitment to historically disadvantaged communities, Portnoy’s Complaint and Pornografia spotlight the resistance growing in tandem with the narrators’ sexual awakening. Although writing in politically disparate contexts and almost a decade apart, Roth and Gombrowicz use the theme of sexual desire to question the impact of difficult legacies on contemporary Jewish-American and Polish life, respectively. Ultimately, the novels’ engagement with sexuality speaks to the idea of transgressing one’s foundational ties to create an autonomous self, a question relevant for both the American myth and the vexed issues of national belonging shaped by the legacy of Polish Romanticism. This article argues that Roth and Gombrowicz engage with the theme of sexual desire to create a promise of liberation, which allows them to propel the tension between the individual and the collective. Despite leading to moments of emancipation, the characters’ sexual awakening in Portnoy’s Complaint and Pornografia fails to restore their autonomy, dramatizing the novels’ images of imprisonment within the collectivity through a failed attempt to invent an autonomous self.
“A small and great city”: On Translating Contemporary Glasgow
The aim of this article is to explore contemporary literary depictions of Glasgow as material for translation into Polish. Urban literature constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for translators, due to the paradoxical nature of the modern Western city—on the one hand, culture-specific, and on the other, generic, resembling all the other Western cities. As such, urban space epitomises the ambiguous nature of contemporary Western cultures themselves, a fact that is made especially evident in translation, a process/product of cultural interaction through which matters of locality and globality unavoidably come to the fore. This analogy between urban space and culture, while universal, seems particularly relevant to discussions of non-canonical cities, with Glasgow being a prominent example. Since the 1980s and 90s, Scotland’s largest city has been a crucial spot on the country’s literary map, a territory where globalised urbanism converges with a continued quest for a distinct national, cultural, and linguistic selfhood. Drawing on works by such authors as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Denise Mina, and Douglas Stuart, this article explores the image(s) of Glasgow conceived in Scottish fiction of the late 20th and 21st centuries, and examines the city’s renditions in Polish. By doing so, I hope to illuminate the complexities of the contemporary Scottish national self as reflected in Glasgow writing, to investigate how they have been—and can be—approached in translation, and, in the process, to shed some light on the Polish translational handling of cultural and linguistic markedness.
the new Scottish renaissance of the 1980s and 90s
Translation as a Spatial Process: The Linguistic Landscape of Caroline Bergvall’s Soundworks and Installations
In a constantly evolving, interconnected world, both urban and rural space has become a symbolic site of linguistic and cultural gathering. Thus, translation implies a spatial dimension in which different voices converge to represent a plural, heterogeneous world. Among experimental artist Caroline Bergvall’s interlinguistic and multimodal soundworks, the installation VIA (48 Dante Variations) and the performance Ragadawn highlight the importance of the migration of languages through creative exchange. In this case study, through works that invite a real and figurative journey through language(s), sounds, silence, noise, discourses, and history, I engage with the latest trends in Translation Studies to conceive space as a semiotic landscape that communicates beyond linguistic boundaries. Translating these multimodal works also entails translating a multilingual setting in a creative way, conceiving the environment as a palimpsest (to be) translated, and highlighting the figure of the translator as a cultural agent.
Translating Istanbul: Divergent Voices in Travel Writing
Intersemiotic research on urban discourse provides a dynamic perspective for interdisciplinary analysis, particularly within the context of Translation Studies. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s claim that the city is a “discourse” and Kevin Lynch’s notion that the image of the city is dynamic and influenced by the observer’s standpoint, in this study I examine three representations of Istanbul. Constantinople by Francis Marion Crawford, Letters from Constantinople by Georgina Adelaide Müller, and Constantinople: Old and New by H. G. Dwight are all treated here as examples of what Sündüz Öztürk Kasar terms traduction en filigrane (watermark translation). I also draw on Theo Hermans’s concept of “the translator’s voice” and adopt Bento’s categorization of tourist, traveler, and migrant travel writers to demonstrate how three distinct voices shape evolving interpretations of Istanbul through their authors’ unique experiences and backgrounds. Four recurring themes are identified across the travelogues: Galata as a site of cultural and social exchange, everyday life in Istanbul, the city’s mosques, and its cemeteries. Each translator leaves concrete “watermark” traces in their attempts to convey culturally embedded concepts to their audience; however, the extent and form of these traces vary depending on the translators’ level of cultural familiarity. This is particularly evident in Müller’s narrative, where the traces of traduction en filigrane are noticeably fewer; as a tourist translator with limited knowledge of the city and its traditions, she has fewer cultural elements to process and integrate into her text, which results in a more surface-level representation of Istanbul.
Between Translation and Translocation: How Art Sensorially Explodes Language in the Airport Space
After Bataille, one can argue that, like the “castle, church, temple, or palace” before, nowadays the airport terminal—as elementary architecture of modern urban communication—emerges as a “grand didactic monument.” Erected to manage landside movement prior to flight, the air terminal as a techno-capitalist structure axiomatically operates with language, thus training the sensorium. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical toolbox, in the first part of this essay, I will elucidate how language, spatially deployed in the airport, operates as a system of order-words. In doing so, I will account for how translation moves away from textual experience to become a logistic and increasingly automated procedure, thus contributing a negative understanding of air terminal space as an alienating non-place. Curiously, leading airports are simultaneously incorporating art to create unique and memorable encounters which enhance passenger experience by constructing a sense of place. In the latter part, I will engage with Eve Fowler’s A Universal Shudder, exhibited at LAX in 2022, exploring aesthetic manners in which it configures language and/in the air terminal. I propose that this artwork heightens awareness not so much of art as art (in the airport), but rather of the translocating power of language itself, which it sensorially stimulates. Consequently, the pragmatics of translation will be shown to coincide with a political aesthetic of translocation, which explodes the airport regime of order-words, thus yielding a novel mode of experiencing and understanding the air terminal.
Refiguring and Normalizing Urban Space: Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlād ḥāratinā and Its English, Polish, and Spanish Translations
The Arabic term ḥāra denotes a specific topographical unit of the traditional Middle-Eastern, especially Egyptian, city. Variously translated into English—e.g., as lane, alley, but also quarter, district, neighbourhood—it belongs to the category of culture-bound terms. This article presents an analysis of its use in the novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959) by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), in which it plays a crucial role, and of how it has been rendered in four translations into English, Polish, and Spanish. The difficulty which the translators had to negotiate when dealing with ḥāra lies not only in its cultural specificity, but also in its polysemy: five semantic facets of this term are distinguished in this study (geographic, metonymic, architectural, social, and cultural/economic), of which four can be found in the novel. A number of occurrences of ḥāra in these four senses and their equivalents used in the four translations are discussed in terms of their semantics and connotations. Special attention is paid to the non-canonical use of this term to which Mahfouz resorted in order to refigure the topography of the Egyptian city and to give the novel an allegorical dimension. In translation, this meaningful alteration is reverted and literary space normalized back into a conventional shape. The analysis shows how the translators have domesticated the literary representation of urban space to suit Western notions, normalizing it in certain cases, but in some others have opted for foreignizing solutions.
GG and the City: What Canada’s Major Translation Award Reveals about Its Metropolises
In this article I consider the predominance of metropolises in the Canadian publishing sector through the lens of award-winning translations. My research is based on a database of information on Canadian literary prizes (gathered through reports and websites of Canadian prize-granting organisations and Aurora, the Library and Archives Canada catalogue which also queries the WorldCat search engine), specifically on the awardees and finalists of the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GG) in both Translation categories (English-to-French and French-to-English). Data about the cities and publishers connected with the original books and the translations, as well as about the finalist translators’ places of residence, demonstrate that Montréal occupies a central place in this landscape. Indeed, an overwhelming majority (82%) of the finalists in the GG English-to-French Translation category were published in this city; likewise, an appreciable number of books translated from French into English (21% of the finalists in this category, versus 54% for Toronto and 16% for Vancouver). While it is hardly surprising that Toronto and Montréal are, respectively, home to most English and French original publications, Montréal stands out as the main city where translators, in both language combinations, live and work.
Translating Urban/Translating Ritual: An Ethnographic Study of Dev Uthan Ekadashi
Gurugram—a city located near Delhi, in the state of Haryana—is an important contributor to the country’s information technology, finance, and banking sectors. Geographically, it offers a rich amalgamation of the urban and the rural; while the urban is an eclectic mix of regions and religions, the rural is still rooted in folkloric traditions. One such tradition is Dev Uthan Ekadashi: celebrated around ten days after Diwali, it marks the awakening of Lord Vishnu from his four-month long sleep, which symbolises a fresh beginning to the Hindu wedding season. To mark the occasion, this cosmopolitan city’s Haryanvi Hindu women gather to create illustrations, sing folksongs, and perform several rituals. In this paper we examine Gurugram as a site of translation by analysing data collected through two sessions of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in November 2021 and November 2022. We investigate the relationship between the ritual and the space, both of which, we argue, undergo translation; furthermore, we posit that the women performing the ritual become cultural agents within a postcolonial space. Thus, our study establishes Gurugram as a translational city, demonstrating resistance where the folkloric tradition is kept alive through cultural meanings shaped by language interaction.
Community Centres as Sites of Translation: Placemaking in Edinburgh
This article presents a research project comprising a series of community initiatives in Edinburgh, a city which displays a disproportionately English-heavy linguistic profile, despite the cosmopolitan influences of both migration and tourism. Our case study created sites that can be conceptualised as translation spaces, where the dominant direction of translation is challenged and critiqued, or even temporarily reversed to reclaim urban space. The research team collaborated with local libraries and community centres to establish several sites of translation. This paper focuses on one key site: a series of art workshops led by refugee artists. Drawing upon the concept of translation space from Translation Studies, we explicitly thematised the role of language(s) and language exchange in these microsites, so that language traffic and dynamics could be observed, discussed, and challenged. In this way, this article contributes to the study of translation space in two aspects. Firstly, it demonstrates how contested language spaces can be analysed through translation practices manifested in various material modes, including interpretations (or, oral translations) provided by participants for one another in art workshops, and intersemiotic translation, from feelings through languages to artwork. Secondly, the paper reflects on how creating such microsites of translation can contribute to resisting the dominant direction of translation in the city.
A Dramaturgy of Translation: The Brussels City Theatre as a Site of Negotiation between Language Policy and Practice
State-funded city theatres play an important role in keeping a finger on the pulse of society. As porous institutions that act as meeting places between artists and citizens, they can present themselves as reflexive or subversive voices. The combination of Brussels’ idiosyncratic sociolinguistic situation and its artist-driven performing arts landscape provides an exceptional context for encounter between the wealth of language communities and heterogeneous audiences. In this article, I examine how the Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS) uses this bottom-up dynamic to reflect the city’s urban multilingualism both on stage and in its outreach strategies. I consider the institution’s exemplary role in structurally embedding a trilingual translation policy, and its latitude in relation to politically conditioned requirements in a city where Dutch is increasingly becoming a minority language. This way, I demonstrate that, far beyond catering for the Flemish minority, KVS’s language and translation policy, as well as its principles, align with a future-oriented political project based in actual language practices. Furthermore, I highlight the particular role of the in-house “city dramaturg,” who probes the urban fabric and guards the institution’s vision while navigating the conditions imposed by funding bodies. It is argued that, by destabilising long-standing linguistic and cultural relations, KVS functions as a translation site, a shared space of debate to negotiate language relations and translation practices.
A Review of Eve Dunbar’s Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction (University of Minnesota Press, 2024)
Translational Dynamics in Urban Space: Exploring Battala’s Multilingual Cultural Encounter
“Battala” is a Bengali metonym for commercial print culture which gained popularity during the Bengal Renaissance. This print culture became a translational palimpsest, disseminating literary genres and leading to the creation of a site where high and low culture converged. Our paper examines the complex relationship between 19th-century colonial Calcutta and the languages in this fast-developing city. The popular print culture blurred distinctions between cultural forms, transcending geographical and literary boundaries of the colonial cosmopolis. This paper contributes to the discourse on translating otherness in the city by demonstrating how Battala intricately reflected relationships between language, memory, and urban space within the historical and cultural context of colonial Calcutta. This is done through an analysis of selected works, including Koutuk Shatak by Harishchandra Mitra, Rar Bhar Mithya Katha Tin Loye Kolikata by Pyarimohan Sen, and Ki Mojar Koler Gari by Munsi Azimuddin. Other works that highlight the blurring of cultural spaces include the translation of The Arabian Nights by Avinash Chandra Mitra (titled Sachitra Ekadhik Sahasra Dibas). Additionally, translations of Ameer Hamzar Puthi by Abdun Nabi and Shah Muhammad Saghir’s Yūsuf Zuleikhā show significant Urdu and Arabic-Persian influence. By analyzing Battala’s interactions with marketplaces, different communities, and intellectual salons, this study adds to the interdisciplinary discussion on translation and urban space. It examines the city’s symbolic representations in popular literature, as well as its geographic location and social significance.
Urban Un/Belonging: Translating Pre-Partition Spaces in Old Rawalpindi, Pakistan
In this article, I propose a transgressive re/inscription of the city spaces of Old Rawalpindi through the lens of Sherry Simon’s integrated translational city theory. In the wake of the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent into the Muslim-majority Pakistan and the Hindu-majority India, a large number of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains living in Rawalpindi migrated to India. The numerous houses and other buildings that they left behind have been variously re/purposed, abandoned, and re/occupied by the Muslims arriving from India. The data for this study consists of documentation of these buildings, official websites and studies, interviews with the im/migrants and locals, and the researcher’s observations. The in/consistencies between the official versions and those of the current and past residents, crucially highlighted by the digital media, suggest multiple identities and a semiotic un/belonging.
Exploring Yaoundé as a Linguistically Divided Capital City of an English and French Bilingual African Nation
This article examines the place of translation in the public space in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, an African nation with a threefold (German, English, and French) colonial heritage. The collected quantitative and qualitative data consisted of public space literature, i.e. outdoor advertising in the streets and other urban spaces where francophone and anglophone communities interact. Data analysis combined with the theory of translationality proposed by Sherry Simon in 2014 and 2021 revealed that Yaoundé is not a dynamic translation zone, because the translational activity in this urban space is minimal. Instead, Yaoundé is almost distinctively monolingual in French and English, and quasi-untranslated. This quasi-absence of translation-mediated contact between the communities makes Yaoundé a linguistically divided city, where French-speaking and English-speaking citizens live in juxtaposition and co-exist in relative isolation. This adversely impacts the traffic of information and opportunities across linguistic borders.
Always in Motion: Cities, Languages, Histories
Majorca as a Translational Space: Creating and Questioning Identity through Translation
Majorca offers a rare combination of opportunities to develop a study of translation and space. Not only is it a site of rich historical cultural contact, but it is also a present location of contact and tension: between Spanish and Catalan; between distinct forms of Catalan; with the languages spoken by significant economic migrant populations and expatriate communities, and languages represented by large tourist populations. Processes of layering, replacement, addition, and effacement of cultural forms are evident throughout the island, to the point that translation is a condition for creating Majorca’s own cultural identity. In this article I shall develop Sherry Simon’s search for translation in the urban environment to identify and analyse translational markers on the Mediterranean island of Majorca and its capital Palma, and seek their effects on the island’s communities as well as their sense of identity. I thereby propose “strong” forms of translation to complement the “weak” forms sketched by Simon. These strong forms result from cultural contact to ensure a deeper understanding of cultural identity, and empathy between cultures in our increasingly interconnected world.
“We translate in order to differ”: Kaja Gucio in Conversation with Jerzy Jarniewicz
Translating the “City of the Eye”: Mapping Contemporary Venice between Travel Writing and Residents’ Accounts
In this article I explore the “translational city” through the unique lens of contemporary Venice. The multiple cities that have been the subject of work on the “translational city” display different linguistic and cultural relations: from the dual city, through (post)colonial cities, to cosmopolitan cities. While Venice historically shares some of the characteristics of these models, its social, cultural, and linguistic make-up is exceptional in terms of both nature and scale. Progressive hyper-touristification in the last 30 years has led to a complete transformation of Venice as an urban space with the dramatic shrinking of the resident population and their ways of inhabiting the city and has made travel writing central to how its urban spaces are imagined and experienced. This shift calls for a reconsideration of the role of travel writing in shaping our perceptions and our experiences of the city. The article offers a comparative analysis of how the city is imagined, by placing Joseph Brodsky’s influential English travel account, Watermark, in conversation with two collections of residents’ narratives; it is also an attempt to map how travel writing, as a form of translation, mediates between the city’s global perceptions and its local realities. The analysis uncovers an important disjuncture between how Venice is imagined by Brodsky as a global citizen and how it is remembered, memorialised, and constructed by Venetian residents as “denizens” seeking to reconstitute a local/minoritised language. The article explores Venice as a specific example of a translational city, while reflecting on a broader set of questions on the politics of language, travel, translation, and community.
A Hybrid Medium—Life (and Love) in John Ashbery’s Poetry
The article focuses on the form of John Ashbery’s long poems, with a view to discussing it as a vitalist formula. Ashbery continues the American romantic vitalism by bringing it close to perspectives provided by contemporary post-secular thought. In this context, Ashbery is a poet of what the Polish post-secular scholar Agata Bielik-Robson calls “life enhanced”—a position achieved by human subjectivity that becomes conscious of its immersion in materiality, while also retaining an individuating distance from the orders of nature and death. However, given Ashbery’s American transcendentalist heritage, his is a modification of the post-secular position. In it, life is a quality of the poetic medium which develops a hybrid connecting negative transcendence, essential to Bielik-Robson’s “life enhanced,” with the immanently materialist flow of experience. On one hand, Ashbery’s hybrid mediums can be associated with the immanence of the flux of experience described in William James’s concepts of “radical empiricism.” On the other, Ashbery is also a poet of negativity that disturbs the flow of immanence—a longing for completion that is a remnant of transcendentalist models informing romantic thought. The hybrid medium of Ashbery’s long poems is a form of subjective life in which the psychological complications of the transcendence-based models—skepticism or solipsism—are modified as traces of transcendence merging with the flux of experience. The result is an environment in which material life obtains resolution, while the psychological subject recognizes its connectedness to the material habitat.
life in post-secular and ecopoetic perspectives
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Negotiating Interior Frontiers: Lara Haddad’s A Question of History (2015–16)
Bringing together insights originating in law studies and art analysis, this article approaches the work of the US-based Syrian artist Lara Haddad through the figuration of “interior frontiers,” exposing how both “interior bonds” and “internal borders” tended to shape legal regulations introduced in the US in the aftermath of 9/11 for the purpose of conducting “the global war on terror.” Referring to the concept of “plasticity,” the article examines the intimate (dis)identifications experienced by the artist in the context of the politically saturated cultural discourses on violence which emerged from the post-9/11 spatialities of (inter)national law. The article argues that politically engaged art offers a means to affectively connect with the personal ways of coping with the persistent visceral presence of structural violence, shedding light on how political protocols and cultural representations impinge upon the individual experiences of many Muslims residing inside and outside the US territory. Opening established meanings to new interpretations, such art contributes to the process of revising dominant oppressive significations, creating room for critical contestation and increased transcultural understanding.
Duration of the Archive: Soundscapes of Extreme Witnessing in Divya Victor’s Curb
This paper examines the significance of soundscapes in the Tamil American poet Divya Victor’s reconstruction of the archive of anti-South Asian violence in her acclaimed poetry collection Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021). Being a continuation of the poet’s investigation of the limits of conceptual and “documental” poetics (Michael Leong), advanced in her Natural Subjects, UNSUB and Kith, Curb appropriates public and personal records to critique discrimination against the South Asian community in America’s post-9/11 political landscape. Victor’s poetics enact extreme witnessing, re-establishing the archive’s unheard durations that her modality of the lyric upholds, and recovering locutions of the Indian diaspora eroded or erased by anti-immigrant and anti-Asian racism. Tracing the dynamics of location and locution at the sites of violent events as well as their barely audible frequencies registered in the sequence “Frequency (Alka’s Testimony),” I argue that the archive’s duration in Curb is extended by forms of “sonic agency” (Brandon LaBelle). I further show how, through the poetic work of hearing and sounding (including such techniques as echolocation and ventriloquy), Victor creates a simultaneously critical and lyrical space akin to auditory experience where the text’s multiple durational vectors throw into sharp relief the lives “curbed,” diminished, or destroyed by wounding, fear, and trauma, testifying to the extremity of the very act of witnessing. Finally, focusing on opacity as a fundamental quality of the archive, I also turn to Carolyn Chen’s concrète sound compositions and Amarnath Ravva’s assemblages that traverse Curb, accompanying the poet in collaborative hearing of the archive’s spatial, temporal, and sonic dynamics.
The Posthuman Body as an EcoGothic Wasteland in Allison Cobb’s After We All Died and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic
The focus of my inquiry are environmentally inflected metaphors and discourses of toxicity which inform the contemporary North American posthuman lyric. This provisional generic category of the posthuman lyric has been inspired by the recent shift from an anthropocentric understanding of lyric subjectivities to a biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter. The posthuman angle questions the concept of the sovereign human self, stressing transversal ontologies, open to inter-agential exchanges, diverse biosemiotic processes and communication loops. My primary interest is in poetic representations of the human body as a transversal, toxic, catastrophe- and death-haunted wasteland. The volumes chosen to problematize those processes are Allison Cobb’s After We All Died (2016), an elegiac meditation on the dying human species and anthropogenic change, and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018), which probes the leaky perimeters of the chemical self using an electronic microscope and burden tests of the poet’s own bodily tissues. The posthumanist angle which informs the analyses is supplemented with an ecoGothic one, as both critical paradigms can be seen as interrogatory discourses which probe human fears and hopes concerning the “edge of the human” and the recognition of non-human agency. Within the ecoGothic framework, nature is seen as “a contested site”—a “space of crisis,” where human and non-human ecologies interact and co-produce meaning. This double lens will be used for the study of posthuman imaginaries and Anthropocene affects employed by Dickinson and Cobb.